


The Boy Who Would Be Guildmaster

by MoriartyElias



Category: Magic: The Gathering (Card Game)
Genre: During Canon, Fix-It, Gen, these are important details of the story and you cannot just leave them out wizards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-01
Updated: 2020-01-01
Packaged: 2021-02-25 00:00:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22006597
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MoriartyElias/pseuds/MoriartyElias
Summary: The neglected-by-canon story of Domri Rade's first meeting with Nicol Bolas, and the beginning of their dark plan to destroy Ravnica.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 6





	The Boy Who Would Be Guildmaster

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AddieRade](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AddieRade/gifts).



Domri Rade was not on Ravnica.

This by itself was not particularly noteworthy, and neither was the fact that not a living soul on Ravnica cared that he wasn’t around. It was the sort of thing that he really shouldn't have been able to get angry about, not after so many years of being passed over by anyone and everyone. And sometimes, it wasn't. Sometimes, Domri was riding so high on the joy of destruction and murder that he didn't feel alone and unloved.

But he was not riding high, and so Domri Rade was angry.

Worlds upon worlds pulsed with his rage, forests rustling with every shallow breath and mountains rumbling with every movement of his thin muscles. The mana from across the planes boiled in his chest, crackling and curling and searching for any outlet. With no spell to act through, the energy earthed in his brain. Memories beat a bloody stampede through his mind, the pretty lies of civilization and wilderness alike echoing over and over.

The arresters, telling him there was a better life in the orphanages. Ruric Thar, promising him that the Guildpact would be restored, that the Gruul would be brought back to their true glory. The ancient stories told by the shamans, of the inevitable end of it all.

“Idiots.”

An outlet. The mana sparked and leaped, cracking the trees around him and filling the air with the briefest ghost of a fire. The air felt clearer as he huffed and growled, all the slight impurities burned away by his rage. Earth hardened, trees groaned, and always the heat was building in his chest. 

Somewhere, far enough away to be safe but close enough to be a risk, Domri was being noticed. Monsters were waking up, and they were waking up hungry. He grinned, and somewhere in the multiverse a volcano erupted.

Domri took a step forward, and almost before he wanted to, he was taking another step. Mana sparked against mana and the earth crunched like bones beneath his feet, sorcery arcing off of him on pure instinct. He was accelerating, and the world was blurring away, and now everything wanted to see what was moving so fast.

Fire and life surged around and through Domri, and the flecks of earth kicked up around him came together into their own terrifying selves. Dirt and grass stretched and folded into flesh and muscle, fur and tusks growing not where they were supposed to but where he remembered them. Domri was joined, surrounded by a stampede of titanic boars colored red by blood that they had yet to shed, their eyes bloodshot with an endless desire for vengeance.

They were new. They were his. They were the finisher, the final blow, nothing less than the forerunners of the End-Raze itself.

The trees in front of them were cracking now, shoved aside by something. There was a roar, a challenge, a scream of hunger and fear. Something was charging at him, at _them_. An imperiosaur, an apex predator utterly unmatched against anything of its own world.

“Let me teach you how to die,” Domri growled. And then the boars were charging, faster than lightning, faster than light, faster than the very thought of response. They were Domri’s answer for all the laws of Ravnica, and they hardly slowed in their charge as they tore through the monster.

Domri screeched to a halt, and laughed at the small hill of dirt he kicked up. “It worked! It actually worked!” He hooped and hollered and pumped his fists in the air, and laughed as Ravnican thunder-oaks burst up from the earth and tore their own way up though the jungle canopy.

“For a given value of ‘worked’, of course.”

Domri spun around, his body swelling with might spells. “Who’s there?”

“Just a concerned citizen of the multiverse.”

An awful dragon, sinuous and vile, uncoiled itself from above. It was a thin reed of a thing, looking more like a stretched-out piece of taffy given life than any kind of fierce predator. The effect was not helped by a thin scarf that the dragon wore around its neck, for no apparent reason. Domri chuckled and sneered at the thing’s ridiculous frame.

“You ever came around Utvara, you’d get torn to pieces in an instant.”

“Unless they laughed me out of town first,” the dragon countered with a chuckle that seemed far too warm for such a cold-blooded thing. “I hope you’ll pardon the intrusion, but I was just sunning myself on a nearby mountain and couldn’t help but overhear your elation.” It slithered down one of the new trees with a deeply unpleasant smile. “What were you doing, little man?”

Domri laughed, and held out his hands to beckon the boars closer. When they didn’t respond to whistling, he conjured grapes and steak for them to gorge themselves on. “I was making these. Aren’t they amazing?”

“Quite superb craftsmanship, yes.” The dragon let out a snort and breathed in, its eyes sparkling with magic. “And fully self-aware as well? You should be very proud of yourself, little man.”

“I have a name, you know!” Domri puffed out his chest, and hoped the dragon wouldn’t notice the unearthly ripple of might magic across his muscles. “I’m Domri Rade, and soon everyone will know me as the man who destroyed Ravnica!”

Another snort, but this one felt much more targeted. “And you’re planning to do that… with those?” It extended a single clawed digit and pointed at the boars.

Domri huffed. Where did this dragon get off, mocking his creations? “Yeah, and what about it? You saw what they did to that ‘saur!”

“Yes, but what can they do against concrete? Or a properly organized phalanx? Or, heaven forbid, a single, solitary spell?” The dragon sneered and snarled every second word, and Domri ground his teeth. The dragon sounded just like everyone else, looking for a hundred ways to put him down that sounded more reasonable than calling him short and stupid. 

“Well, I think they’re cool.” He took a few deep breaths, just waiting for the dragon to move in close enough for him to tear its skull apart by the cheekbones.

“Oh, of that there can be no doubt.” The dragon unfurled against the ground and rested its head on a claw as though it were a human. “Still, as one who has made something of a habit of collecting civilization-leveling superweapons over the years, I cannot help but feel that they are lacking… a certain something.”

Domri looked at his boars, running his hands over their coarse fur as he analyzed their forms. They had muscles and bones in all the right places, built on a solid base and made better in every way he could think of. Their eyes were always moving, their senses sharp enough and their muscles toned enough that they could react to any threat and still have energy left to charge. They had none of the self-preservation instincts that made natural creatures so inefficient as fighters, surging over and through their enemies without hesitation or restraint. And most of all, they were fast, so fast that any spell flung at them would hit nothing but concrete.

“They could be...” he fumbled for a word, for anything that could improve his creation, “bigger?”

The dragon nodded in consideration. “That is certainly one path you could take. But to me, it seems that the key weakness of these boars is the same of all boars, and indeed of all mana clones. They are not the original.”

There was a brief moment where Domri did not realize what the dragon was talking about. It did not last long. “The original… You mean...”

“The first. The greatest. The Birth of Wilderness and the Death of Civilization. If you wish to destroy Ravnica, you must awaken Ilharg.”

The dragon said the Raze-Boar’s name in that way that only a planeswalker could, a naming that was halfway to a summoning and made the world tremble with power that was only a thought away from being harnessed. Domri found himself bracing to see his god step forward out of nothing, and his heart sank when he realized that would not happen.

“But, how can I summon him? The shamans, they always tell us that he’ll come in his own time, when the End-Raze is about to begin.” He looked down at himself, at the few measly streets he had tattooed across him. “And how else could I do that, but to start the End-Raze myself?”

“There are ways of doing these things.” The dragon began to rake its claws against the earth, making circles and symbols at random. “The greatest weakness of the Gruul Clans is that they are divided, but have the greatest potential for damage when they gather in numbers. So how, then, might we seek to maximize their potential, to create the ideal conditions for the End-Raze?”

“Bring them together. Whip them into a frenzy.” Domri clenched his hands into fists. “But I can’t do that. They won’t listen to me. The clans will answer to nobody but themselves.”

“You know that isn’t true, Domri.” The dragon was beginning to sound very satisfied. “They will answer when the alpha calls. They will listen when Borborygmos speaks.”

Domri stared up at the dragon, utterly dumbfounded by the idea. “Oh yeah, that’s _much_ easier! Instead of convincing every clan to help me, I just have to talk the most stubborn cyclops in the multiverse into getting off his lazy ass and following through on something!”

“Actually, I was proposing that you challenge him for the position of alpha.”

The world was never more quiet than when a planeswalker had just finished talking.

Domri stared at the dragon, eyes wide and fists quivering. “I… I can’t.” The memories flashed through his mind, of Borborygmos flinging entire buildings at Simic leviathans just for covering fire, of every clan parting without a word at his passing. “I’m not strong enough. Nobody’s strong enough.”

The dragon laughed, throwing its head back in an awful way that made it look like there wasn’t a single bone in the neck. “Who is this, that would take on all of Ravnica with two pigs but cannot measure up to one beast?”

“He’s not just some beast!” Domri’s knees were knocking together in fear, and his entire body was trying to roll into a ball. “I’ve seen him go toe-to-toe with dragons and demons! We still tell stories about how he wrestled Rakdos to a standstill! Nobody can stand up to him. I… I can’t.”

The dragon scratched its chin. “Curious, that he could be so powerful for so long and yet the End-Raze has not come to pass.”

“What?”

The dragon gestured at the earth, and something caught in Domri’s throat as he recognized the symbols. He knew those points on Ravnica, although the sigils surrounding them were as much a mystery to him as the Azorius regulations.

“He has been your guildmaster for centuries, and yet the Rubblebelt cannot even make a complete circle around Ravnica. You say that he is strong, but where has that strength been spent? On petty victories, skirmishes that make him look stronger than he is. He has focused on bringing down his foot as hard as he can so that nobody will notice how small his footprints are." The dragon snarled, its wings snapping and half-unfurling in fury. "Did he not promise that the Gruul would stand on equal ground among the guilds? Did he not give his blessing to Ruric Thar, only for Beleren to steal the title that should have belonged to the Clans? And does he not stumble back to his throne every day with nothing to show for his exploits but scars and stories?"

The words made sense. The Gruul had been left behind, by their chieftain as much as their city. The cyclops was a failure and deserved to die, that much he agreed with. But none of that changed what he had seen, on the days when Borborygmos was moved to action. "I've seen it, though. He'd kill me if I tried. There's no way I could..."

"Couldn't you? He is one, but you can be many." The dragon gestured to the boars, and they snorted in response. "Do you think even he could stand in the way of an entire stampede of these monsters? And even if he could, he has only one eye. While the boars distract him, you could kill him from any angle you desired. If nothing else, you are a planeswalker, and he is nothing but a mortal who has broken his promise.” The dragon drew itself up to its full height, and suddenly it didn’t look so ridiculous. “If you believe you can destroy Ravnica, then you can defeat Borborygmos. More than that, you _deserve_ to defeat him.”

Something was rising in Domri’s chest, a fire that he had been searching for all his life. He grinned, and felt the forests around him surge with his own reflected confidence. “And when I’m chief, what do we do then?”

“You may not be able to read these equations, Domri Rade, but you can draw. Show this to your shamans, and they will counsel you in the invoking of Ilharg.” Reality creaked at the word, and Domri could almost taste the way that he would summon it.

“I will challenge Borborygmos for the title of guildmaster,” he whispered in that special way that echoes across history. “I will win. And what I begin, the End-Raze will finish.”

Domri clenched his fists, and planeswalked. The last thing he saw as Muraganda bled into Ravnica was the dragon’s awful grin.

**Author's Note:**

> Expect a reworked version of this story to pop up in a thousand years when The Gay Magic Story finally reaches War of the Spark.


End file.
